I believe I finally understood why some people have issues with Dawntrail

[koko-on-da-forumz]

Zenos was perfectly okay with destroying his own country and killing civilians by the score just to try and goad the WoL into a fight. Doesn't even have a particularly good reason other then wanting to fight.

That's not evil, it's selfish. He also saved his country and the world (twice) for the same reason. When civilians challenge him to a fight as representative of his colonial nation, he dissuades them. Girls just want to have fun, and if that requires putting on a theatrical villain persona for the WoL, he will.

[GrizzlyTank]

No he was not, he was one of the most based and single minded villain in FF14. And while in some context that maybe called "shallow" and "one dimensional", in FF14 he's a unique - one of a kind.

I'm actually tired of how the writing always always ALWAYS try to humanize the villains at the end. 95% of the people we go after always gonna turn out symapthetic at the end, to the point it starts feeling pathetic. Like ... in Dawn Trail there is literally zero bad guy because everyone has a reason. I feel if you ask FF14 do an adaption of World War 2, they probably gonna try to make Hitler "isn't actually that bad".


Zenos was 101% selfish and un-apologetically evil, we need more such villain in FF14.

The writing doesn't always try to humanise the villains. As seen with Valens and Asahi, both irredeemable, Yuyuhase and Laurentius to a lesser degree. Yet none of them were used as a deus ex machina to quite literally kill off half the plot because the character was bored.

Look at Stormblood, the most disliked expansion, and look at how it's patches were much better received once Zenos was out of the picture.

[Isala]

The writing doesn't always try to humanise the villains. As seen with Valens and Asahi, both irredeemable, Yuyuhase and Laurentius to a lesser degree. Yet none of them were used as a deus ex machina to quite literally kill off half the plot because the character was bored.

Look at Stormblood, the most disliked expansion, and look at how it's patches were much better received once Zenos was out of the picture.

You know who else was out of the picture? Lyse. And let me tell you, that was MUCH more of a happy impact than having Zenos disappear for a bit.

[ravenfyhre]

I think you could say Zenos was one dimensional or shallow, but people liked him a lot because he had personality.
Sometimes it's not ONLY about the way it is written, but the way it's conveyed.

[Kashou]

The fetch quests are about 1% of the problems with Dawntrails story.

[Reimmi]

To sum it up, it's probably the way the team does fetch quests.
I think YoshiP almost always goes for a safe route in order to not compromise the release date and the overall quality of the product, but that means there are corners to be cut for something to be released in proper time.

For example, mini-games are usually the same 2 or 3 like spotting waldo or playing hide and seek.

Now, let's us imagine an ideal scenario where the team has infinite resources and time:
- I never liked the story of FF7 (original or otherwise) but I enjoyed how they implemented a lot of mini-games for every small quest on 7 rebirth.
This might not be feasible on FFXIV if you have to re-use content since it's an MMO and there are some limitations to it, but man... It would have been great if every fetch quest had a mini-game associated with it feeling more like you are playing a small fun game instead of simply reading a text and moving from A to B.
For example, if gathering is required, maybe re-using mini-games from the golden saucer like "Out on a Limb" to cut down trees could be possible, or maybe things like simple (not so complex) jumping puzzle games like in GATEs, chocobo racing, etc~
Or even steal some ideas from Nintendo games? xD

There could or could not be harder options, but essentially enjoying the journey could potentially ease some of the worries of people who think the story is slow because you tend to focus on a smaller goal at a time.

Alas, I personally do not dislike slow burns and I understand this is too resource heavy for a team that is already trying to deal with a graphical update.
So I thought that this was probably the main reason some people had issues not only with the way some quests are done in FFXIV but also in FFXVI.

I think what would help is just having fetch quests include some combat (gameplay) in between
not talking like kill 20 bears or anything crazy. just kill a couple waves of enemies to defend alphinaud or something, done

[SillyCrow]

My guess is that they tried to jam everything in the regular schedule while doing sweeping changes and they just ran out of time.

Hopefully they'll have a workflow optimized for the new process to have more time to make 8.0 far better and fun.

[Silver-Strider]

I liked the Rite of Succession arc of the story, although I would've absolutely preferred to support Koana than Wuk in that regard. He started out a bit rough but he grew to learn about his people in a realistic and satisfying way that I enjoyed. While I do feel Wuk is just Lyse 2.0, I find her to be inoffensive for the most part but wholly unworthy to actually lead her people.

My problem is really everything after the Rite is finished. I didn't like the genre shift that the story went with and literally wanted that whole part of the expansion to just burn off and die really, even more so than what they gave us. It just left a bad taste in my mouth that I honestly felt that I should've just skipped cutscenes because of how indifferent I felt to it all.

[Ryaze]

Mini-games ok, if they are done well for modern standards, but not TT type mini-games. Keep relative control of the WoL. Like new types of quest gameplay. Yes to more overworld experiences with control of your character, but the story also needs to be cut down. More showing, and far less telling.

Playing through DT there were multiple times I went 2+ hours from cutscene to cutscene, walking around an area clicking on 3-6 NPCs and having no meaningful player engagement. So many redundant cutscenes of 4-8 people standing around in a circle narrating to each other, with a camera angle just above the group but at a slight angle. You know what I'm talking about. These "cutscenes" need to go. Like right now. Things often either already said, or implied. Cutscenes that could have been far shorter with NPC text and didn't need to completely remove me from the game. There were multiple amazing cutscenes in DT so I know the team has the talent, but unfortunately they were few and far between compared to the rest of the it. I don't expect to have more of these cutscenes and they should remain as these major impressive story moments, but the rest of the clutter needs to be seriously pruned down.

I know people love this game for the story, but the time and energy spent on the MSQ has ballooned to ridiculous proportions. It hasn't made DT a better game for it. Sometimes less is more.

[CKNovel]

When talking with friends about MSQ, we've identified multiple problem:

• Pointless padding that could be replaced with something much more interesting
• Hildibrand writing spilled onto the MSQ, annoying jokes
• Lacks of diverse activities, fetch quest, trailing a NPC, spot something
• Wuk Lamat has good point but is sometimes written as a dumb, joyful shonen protagonist

Rolequest also have too much of Hildibrand writing, I get people asked for more Hildibrand but not to be included in the MSQ.
Also, the conflict that would "split" the scions? Just a meaningless interaction.